原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
含詞賦 With rhapsody
法力無邊 Power Without Bound
正是:正是:
一句能通遍沙界,廣大無邊法力深。一句能通遍沙界,广大无边法力深。
逐句解 Line by line
正是:
正是:
Truly it was:
正是 — the same two characters that have been plain confirmation throughout the chapter — is here the storyteller's cue for the closing couplet.
一句能通遍沙界,廣大無邊法力深。
一句能通遍沙界,广大无边法力深。
A single word can reach through sand-grain worlds; / vast and boundless, deep is the power of the Law.
沙界 is the Buddhist figure for a number past counting: worlds as many as the grains of sand in the Ganges. One word reaches all of them, which is the point being made about the spell just recited.
The single couplet that seals the chapter states its theme plainly: one word reaches through worlds numberless as sand, and the power of the Law is vast, boundless and deep. It gathers the whole arc — the vase that held a sea, the flood that made a paradise, the fillet that tamed a demon — into one assertion about reach, where a mere syllable accomplishes what armies and fire could not. After the long comedy and the violence, the verse restores the sound of the sacred: the Bodhisattva's power is not spectacle but the deep, quiet omnipotence of the Law.
The couplet also answers the chapter's opening on its own terms. It began with a lie about identity, carried on through invented calendars and false fathers, and turned on the discovery that a borrowed shape cannot survive being spoken through. Set against all that unreliable talk, the closing claim is about a word that does exactly what it says — reaching every world there is, and needing to be said only once.